Armageddon comes early this year.

The other day was Armageddon in Wisconsin, just in case you missed it. Our local forecasters were predicting a horrible storm that was supposed to produce snow, sleet, ice and chaos. Schools and businesses were closed in anticipation. People stayed home from work. All of SE Wisconsin went into hiding. The storm warning was issued from 3am to 3pm Tuesday, and we all went to bed expecting to wake to horrible road conditions, no power, and (possibly) no hope. Instead, we woke to a fairly mild storm (by Wisconsin standards). A little rain, a little sleet, and a few inches of snow. Racine and Kenosha counties didn't even get that much precipitation. Just some cold wind.

Now, there is no doubt that this storm did some pretty awful things to Omaha NE and other areas in the plains states and I don't fault the local weather folks for thinking that it would do the same here in Wisconsin. But am I the only one who is made nervous by the idea that people claim to be able to predict the weather a decade (or five) from now, when we can't even predict what a single weather system is going to do accurately?

Environmentalists have be banging the doomsday drums for decades. Algore just won a Nobel prize for standing in front of a PowerPoint presentation that told us how polar bears were going to drown and the new coastal beaches will be located somewhere in the Midwest (which will be cool when the ice storms roll through).  But no matter the facts and the scientific "consensus", no one from the camp of alarmism ever takes into account the unpredictability of our current weather patterns. How are we lay-folk supposed to take Algore and his ilk seriously about weather ten years from now, when, time and time again, we fall short of predicting weather ten hours from now? 

And another question, if using the right light bulb now will circumvent our future doom, what kind of light bulbs should those in Plain states have been using to prevent the ice storm that did so much damage? What toilet paper would have reduced the destructive power of Katrina? And shouldn't the government be issuing all American citizens our own private Leer jets, I mean if they're good enough for the Nobel winning, planet saving, Algore, shouldn't we all be using them?